In a contest with nature, there is no contest

I am an impatient woman. That is nothing to brag about, but it happens to be true. There are few things that arouse my impatient streak more than people who refuse to leave an area about to be hit by a hurricane.

I come by this impatience honestly. In 1954 Hazel struck the North Carolina coast. Three couples from my hometown were vacationing on Ocean Isle. They decided to stay despite the warnings. Two of the couples drowned. Margaret Hart, who survived, told of her husband cursing her and telling her to keep swimming, keep swimming. She said she would not have lived through it had he not constantly screamed to keep going. Their daughter was a classmate of mine. So was a daughter of one of the couples who drowned. She was brought up by their grandparents. All three couples had children. I heard their story; it made an impression on this 7-year-old. In my mind, even years later, those two girls were always associated with that devastating storm

My family went to the beach (probably Holden) the next summer and saw the land cleared of buildings. One lone building had survived, a squat concrete-block thing that had been a little store. I remember seeing toilets sitting out by themselves.

Flooding in Morehead City caused by Hurricane Hazel(Photo: Image from NOAA.)

Early on I learned about the power of storms, the power of nature to obliterate everything in its path. Including two couples on vacation. They did not leave because they did not take seriously the danger. They could have easily gone. They had money, gas in the tank, were not in prison or a nursing home or sick in bed. They all had school-age children waiting for them. If only they had thrown the suitcases in the car and gotten out of there. To be fair, weather reporting was primitive compared to today.

The storm was worse than they anticipated. The ferry had quit running once the water rose higher than the ferry’s cables. The three couples went to the only other house on the island that was occupied. Sherman Register, who was part owner of a hardware store on the mainland in Shallotte, was there with his wife Madeline, his 10-year- son Buddy, his newly wed daughter Sonja and her husband Bunky Bellamy who had just finished Army boot camp and was on leave before being sent to Alaska.

The couples asked what they were supposed to do. Sheman put all 11 people in his truck and headed for the highest point on the island. And then a wave overtook the truck, and they were swept away. Sherman Register, his wife and son died. His daughter Sonja was found unconscious and taken to a hospital. She survived along with her young husband, but the marriage did not. The Army discharged Bellamy so he could help with the rebuilding back home.

Although most people seem to be evacuating ahead of Florence, I become impatient when I see people being interviewed about their plans to ride it out. I grew up with children whose parents did not leave.

In a contest with nature, there is no contest. If we do not respect the sea, the river, the environment, the earth, we will pay for our disrespect. We can pass laws, as North Carolina did recently, banning predictions of sea level rise being factored in to setting coastal policies, but that does not change the natural world. Overestimating our ability to control nature, underestimating the natural world’s powers over us, whether in the face of a storm or in our indifference to environmental damage, is dangerous. Arrogant. Lethal.

I cannot quite figure out why those who oppose taking care of the environment do so.. Their own children and grandchildren have to live on this planet. They can’t go to some other planet. Mother Nature will not be mocked. She will teach us, and she will discipline us.

We are so little in the face of the powers of wind and water, the great forces that shaped the cosmos. We are not the conquerors of nature. We are its children. This weekend we witnessed the terror and the beauty of a swirling storm. The words of William Blake about his “tyger” came to me, “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”